Tonight’s Code via RViews: http://bit.ly/2AE6En3

Motivation

the Recipe

Software–seriously, keep up-to-date

install.packages("pacman")
p_load(rmarkdown, knitr, questionr, tidyverse, sessioninfo, update = TRUE)

Make sure RStudio is new enough to get previews

the Data

My guide works with four Pew Research Political Surveys: January, March, August, and October 2016. Data are free and easy to download (but account is required).

Configuring the RMarkdown Template

Building the Template

The Template

I find it easiest to write a fully working example and then make little changes as needed so that knitr::render() can loop over the data sets. First things first.

survey <- read.spss("Jan16/Jan16 public.sav", to.data.frame = TRUE)

Summary stats can easily be inserted into the text like so.

Making Tables with Kable

kable(wtd.table(survey$ideo, survey$sex, survey$weight)/nrow(survey), digits = 2)

Using Kable in a Loop

x <- names(survey)[grep("q2[[:digit:]]", names(survey))]
x

 [1] "q20"  "q21"  "q22a" "q22b" "q22c" "q22d" "q22e" "q22f" "q22g" "q22h"
[11] "q22i" "q25"  "q26"  "q27"  "q28" 

y <- c("ideo", "party")

for (i in x) {
    for (j in y) {
        cat("\nWeighted counts for", i, "broken down by", j, "\n")
        print(kable(wtd.table(survey[[i]], survey[[j]], survey$weight)))  # requires asis=TRUE
        cat("\n")  # break out of table formatting
    }
    cat("\\newpage")
}

Adding a plot

PA <- ggplot(survey) + geom_bar(aes(q1, y = (..count..)/sum(..count..), weight = weight, 
    fill = q1)) + facet_grid(party.clean ~ .)
PA <- PA + theme_minimal() + theme(strip.text.y = element_text(angle = 45)) + 
    xlab("") + ylab("Percent of Country") + scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent) + 
    ggtitle("Presidential Approval: January 2016")
PA

Adapting the Template with Parameters

The next step is to add a parameter with any variables you need. The parameters will be controlled by the R script discussed in a moment.

params:
  spssfile: !r  1
  surveywave: !r 2016

Parameterizing (cont’d)

PA <- PA + ggtitle(paste("Presidential Approval:", params$surveywave))

dir(pattern = ".sav", recursive = TRUE)

[1] "http___www.people-press.org_files_datasets_Aug16/Aug16 public.sav"
[2] "Jan16/Jan16 public.sav"                                           
[3] "March16/March16 public.sav"                                       
[4] "Oct16/Oct16 public.sav"                                           

Automating with knitr

library(pacman)
p_load(knitr, rmarkdown, sessioninfo)

setwd("/users/mohanty/Desktop/pewpolitical/")

waves <- c("August 2016", "January 2016", "March 2016", "October 2016")  # for ggtitle, etc.

for (i in 1:length(waves)) {
    render("pewpoliticaltemplate.Rmd", params = list(spssfile = i, surveywave = waves[i]), 
        output_file = paste0("Survey Analysis ", waves[i], ".pdf"))
}

session <- session_info()
save(session, file = paste0("session", format(Sys.time(), "%m%d%Y"), ".Rdata"))

A Little Version Control

If a package stops working install_version (from library(devtools)) installs older versions.

s <- session_info()
cat("This doc was knit with", s$platform$version, "on", s$platform$os, "using the following packages:")

This doc was knit with R version 3.4.2 (2017-09-28) on macOS Sierra 10.12.6 using the following packages:

s$packages

 package     * version date       source                          
 assertthat    0.2.0   2017-04-11 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 backports     1.1.1   2017-09-25 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 bindr         0.1     2016-11-13 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 bindrcpp      0.2     2017-06-17 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 broom         0.4.2   2017-02-13 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 cellranger    1.1.0   2016-07-27 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 clisymbols    1.2.0   2017-05-21 cran (@1.2.0)                   
 colorspace    1.3-2   2016-12-14 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 digest        0.6.12  2017-01-27 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 dplyr       * 0.7.4   2017-09-28 cran (@0.7.4)                   
 evaluate      0.10.1  2017-06-24 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 forcats       0.2.0   2017-01-23 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 foreign     * 0.8-69  2017-06-22 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 formatR       1.5     2017-04-25 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 ggplot2     * 2.2.1   2016-12-30 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 glue          1.2.0   2017-10-29 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 gtable        0.2.0   2016-02-26 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 haven         1.1.0   2017-07-09 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 highr         0.6     2016-05-09 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 hms           0.3     2016-11-22 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 htmltools     0.3.6   2017-04-28 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 httpuv        1.3.5   2017-07-04 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 httr          1.3.1   2017-08-20 cran (@1.3.1)                   
 jsonlite      1.5     2017-06-01 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 knitr       * 1.17    2017-08-10 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 labeling      0.3     2014-08-23 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 lattice       0.20-35 2017-03-25 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 lazyeval      0.2.1   2017-10-29 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 lubridate     1.7.0   2017-10-29 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 magrittr      1.5     2014-11-22 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 mime          0.5     2016-07-07 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 miniUI        0.1.1   2016-01-15 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 mnormt        1.5-5   2016-10-15 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 modelr        0.1.1   2017-07-24 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 munsell       0.4.3   2016-02-13 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 nlme          3.1-131 2017-02-06 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 pacman      * 0.4.6   2017-05-14 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 pkgconfig     2.0.1   2017-03-21 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 plyr          1.8.4   2016-06-08 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 psych         1.7.8   2017-09-09 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 purrr       * 0.2.4   2017-10-18 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 questionr   * 0.6.3   2017-11-06 local                           
 R6            2.2.2   2017-06-17 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 Rcpp          0.12.13 2017-09-28 cran (@0.12.13)                 
 readr       * 1.1.1   2017-05-16 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 readxl        1.0.0   2017-04-18 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 reshape2      1.4.2   2016-10-22 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 rlang         0.1.2   2017-08-09 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 rmarkdown     1.6     2017-06-15 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 rprojroot     1.2     2017-01-16 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 rstudioapi    0.7     2017-09-07 cran (@0.7)                     
 rvest         0.3.2   2016-06-17 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 scales        0.5.0   2017-08-24 cran (@0.5.0)                   
 sessioninfo * 1.0.0   2017-06-21 CRAN (R 3.4.1)                  
 shiny         1.0.5   2017-08-23 cran (@1.0.5)                   
 stringi       1.1.5   2017-04-07 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 stringr       1.2.0   2017-02-18 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 tibble      * 1.3.4   2017-08-22 cran (@1.3.4)                   
 tidyr       * 0.7.2   2017-10-16 CRAN (R 3.4.2)                  
 tidyverse   * 1.1.1   2017-01-27 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 withr         2.0.0   2017-10-25 Github (jimhester/withr@a43df66)
 xml2          1.1.1   2017-01-24 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 xtable        1.8-2   2016-02-05 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  
 yaml          2.1.14  2016-11-12 CRAN (R 3.4.0)                  

Thanks!